In the past half-century the writing of history has been the object of much critical scrutiny by literary scholars, philosophers, and historians. History painting has traditionally been an important topic in art history. The illustration of history books, in contrast, has not attracted much attention. This study is a preliminary inquiry into the changing ways in which graphics, ranging from representational images to statistical charts, have been used to enhance or illuminate historical texts.
Included within the text is an eight-page color insert of illustrations. An online portfolio of images is available on the publications section of the American Philosophical Society website.
Lionel Gossman is the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Romance Languages Emeritus at Princeton University. Additional publications include Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), Augustin Thierry and Liberal Historiography (Wesleyan University Press, 1979), The Empire Unpossess'd: An Essay on Gibbon's "Decline and Fall" (Cambridge University Press, 1981), Towards a Rational Historiography (American Philosophical Society, 1989), Between History and Literature (Harvard University Press, 1990), and Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas (University of Chicago Press, 2000), as well as many journal articles on historians and the writing of history.
